I-600 A has been processed.......finally

As many of you know, we have been waiting for months for our I-600A to be processed by the US Customs and Immigration Service. It has been a real source of anxiety for me. Last month, I emailed several state representatives and US congressmen about the delay. All I wanted was for the paper to be processed so that they could send us a letter letting us know when and where we can get our fingerprints processed. It seems so simple, but it took forever.

It just so happens that my cousin came in to town with his two children. I stopped by my mother's house and the conversation turned to our impending adoption. Once again, I got on my soapbox about how slow our government is - how we can spend millions of dollars on hearings for baseball steroid issues that happened 10 years ago, but that we can't hire a few more people in the USCIS office to get paperwork processed so that good families can adopt orphaned children. I left the house determined that I would contact the offices of more congressmen/women on Monday. As I pulled up to the house, I stopped by the mailbox - and low and behold, our letter was waiting for us. Hallelujah!

I ran into the house, opened the envelopes (one for Bryan, one for me). We have a fingerprinting appointment on Thursday, February 28 in San Antonio. I called Bryan immediately and let him know that the long awaited form had been received. It is the middle of stockshow season, so Bryan's schedule is extremely busy, but whatever is or has been planned for Feb 28 is secondary to our fingerprinting.

We spent a good part of the morning getting papers together for our dossier. We have quite a bit of paperwork that we must collect from our adoption counselor - and she has to get it all notarized. The other bit of paperwork that we have to get that is more difficult has to do with getting a letter from our bank on our home mortgage, and a letter from our appraisal office about our home. The other forms are a piece of cake and we have them completed. We just need to get all of them together and take them to a notary to get them notarized.

Once we have all of the papers received and notarized, then we will scan them into the computer and send them to our adoption agency. They will preview all of the documents, and then after their approval, we will take our documents to Austin to them apostilled. We feel like we will be able to get everything together and apostilled by the beginning of March. If so, then we send our dossier off to be translated and then on to Russia. It shouldn't take too long before we will actually hear of our child referral.

Here's hoping for a calm week at work for both of us so that we can get all of the paperwork finished and ready to go very soon!!